EVEN if the worst happens and Elian Gonzalez is sent back to Castro’s Cuba, he will lose only his freedom, not his life.

Dominic Nunu, who fled the Liberian regime that likely murdered his family, doesn’t even have that assurance.

Nunu, 27, was taken into custody yesterday and tossed into an Immigration and Naturalization Service holding cell at the Wackenhut facility in Queens. Any moment now, the INS can put him on the flight that will return him to Liberia and, he believes, almost certain death.

His appeals to the United States immigration courts have been exhausted. The pro bono legal team that had been representing him failed to file on deadline a motion that might have bought Nunu time.

As a result, says INS Washington spokesman Richard Bergeron, the Board of Immigration Appeals was technically justified in refusing to hear any more about Nunu’s case.

Nunu’s supporters believe there are more sinister motives in play. Housemate Chris Gilbert says that during a 21-month detention at the Wackenhut facility, Nunu led a hunger strike to protest inhumane conditions for immigrants being held there while awaiting a decision on their status.

Bergeron referred specific questions about Nunu’s case to the agency’s district office, which did not respond to two requests for comment.

Nunu came to the United States in 1997, after a seven-year sojourn in exile from his native Liberia. His late father had been a prominent Christian and human-rights activist who refused to join the rebellion led by army commander Charles Taylor. Nunu escaped the massacre that took the lives of his father, mother and sisters as they slept in their beds.

He fled to neighboring Ivory Coast, lived with Catholic missionaries, and eventually made his way to America, where he requested political asylum. An immigration judge ruled that Nunu’s years of living in the Ivory Coast disqualified him from asylum in the United States.

His supporters say they can prove that Nunu does not have permanent residency in the Ivory Coast, and can be sent back to Liberia at the government’s discretion. Liberians in the United States say Ivory Coast authorities have been repatriating Liberians as a matter of policy.

During his detention, Nunu became gravely ill with myasthenia gravis. He was released only after Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Rep. Jerrold Nadler inquired about the situation, and John Cardinal O’Connor requested a medical parole.

Since then, Nunu has been living with fellow Christians in a multi-ethnic, interdenominational communal house in Harlem. Some of his housemates joined members of the New York Liberian community yesterday for an impromptu protest and prayer vigil at Federal Plaza downtown.

“This is not just Dominic’s fight. This is our fight,” said Sam Shin, shivering in the cold, wet weather.

Shin and the others prayed with Nunu before he left to report to INS officials in the morning. Perhaps they would have done better for him had they surrounded the Harlem house and dared the INS to come get him.

Now, unless there’s a last-minute miracle, Nunu begins Holy Week following a personal Way of the Cross, into a dark and uncertain future.

“It’s not a case of ‘might be killed’ – he will be killed,” says fellow refugee Christian Chea.

“We beg the U.S. government to give Dominic asylum,” he said. “God is our only hope in the other world. But on this earth, we can only rely on the United States.”

Aides to Moynihan and Nadler said they were unaware of Nunu’s desperate situation, but would look into it.

The cardinal is gravely ill, but there’s no doubt where he would stand. Is it too much to ask the U.S. government to give an Easter week gift to the ailing cardinal, and show mercy to a helpless man left with no defense save his prayers?